Reading Notes
This article is meant to be a resource for students as a way to review the reading materials. I understand that people will probably use this page as a way to get the material down without having to do the reading. Don't do that! People should register and use the talk pages! Dana Boyd "Why Youth Heart Social Network Sites" Article deals with popularity of social networks, focusing on Myspace via ethnographic data. Boyd is interested in the ways that social networks have unique identity-forming capacities; she's trying to draw conclusions about identity, status, and communication. Posits social networks as "networked publics" with properties of persistence, searchability, copyability, and invisible audiences. Ethnographic Info - teens who don't use social networks are typically disenfranchised or they consciously object to social networks. When teens don't have Internet access, a participatory divide emerges in which users are able to access Myspace from home typically have much richer social media experiences. Boyd attributes Myspace's popularity to the site's unique music features which encourage interaction between fans and artists. Boyd also focuses on the fact that almost all facets of Myspace are public - including comments, profiles, and friends. This public aspect is important, as it differs from most interactions in that online social networks are mediated publics. According to Boyd, social networks encourage publics and are public themselves, though of a special sort - "mediated networked publics" bound together by technological networks that mediate interactions between users. Boyd differentiates between unmediated publics and social networks in four areas: 1. Persistence - social networks save records of all communication that can be easily located and accessed 2. Searchability - easy to search communications to find other users 3. Replicability - expressions in the networks public are able to be copied verbatim via text 4. Invisible Audiences - networked communication can be accessed by anyone anywhere at any time At this point, Boyd focuses on how identity is created in these social networks. A typical first time user of Myspace usually looks at the profile of another in order to deem what's appropriate in terms of self-representation - a kind of socialization in which the new user learns the social (and sometimes technological) codes for how to present oneself. Boyd uses an impression management model of identity creation consisting of performance (in which an individual shows their created representation), interpretation (in which the individual gauges the reaction of other social network users), and adjustment (the individual changing their representation to elicit a different reaction); for Boyd, this model of identity describes most users of online social networks who "write themselves into being" through their online profiles. Since most teens who use Myspace use it to interact with people they already know off-line, the majority of users create identities that will be accepted by those who already know them. Boyd moves on to discuss privacy and its place in mediated networked publics. When social media users create their profiles, they do so with an 'invisible audience' in mind - unknown users that may come to see anyone's profile. Brings up question of privacy - who's in these invisible audiences and how much do users want to let them see? Boyd expresses this privacy question by stating "In mediated spaces, there are no structures to limit the audience; search collapses all virtual walls" (16). Most users create barriers to limit access to their online selves via page content and site structure - teens may purposely misrepresent themselves in their profiles (common adjustments are changing location and age to reflect a sense of randomness) or change overall Myspace privacy settings (thus restricting access rights for those who can view one's content). These efforts to make one's Myspace private are effective in that they help by restricting information from online predators of any sort (financial, sexual, etc.), though the trade off is that these increased privacy settings limit the amount of possible interaction among users. For teenage users, the frequent question is how to balance having a rich and open social experience with issues of privacy (usually raised among parents and caretakers). The article then moves on to talk about the teenage social experience as a whole. Boyd expresses that youth have little access to public space; their socialization with public audiences is often in very controlled and limited situations, such as primary school. The history of the term 'teenager' is rooted in cultures of education, consumption, and labor. Boyd states "Collectively, 4 critical forces - society, market, law, and architecture - have constructed an age-segregated teen culture that is deeply consumerist but lacks agency" (21). For Boyd, online social networks change the architecture of being a teenager by creating "unregulated publics" (online social networks) within "adult regulated spaces" like schools and homes. Boyd ends by expressing a desire for public interaction - the public is a site of identity formation that teenagers need access to. Identity Performance - Because we can't communicate with vocal inflection or body language over the internet, we have to relearn how to manage peoples impression of ourselves. People carefully choose what information to post, and the capacity for deception is there, as well as conflict with the real world. Boyd notes the case of a potential college student to a prestigious university. While his application was good, his myspace page revealed possible gang ties. Boyd points out that this could simply be his own identity performance, a way of surviving in that environment. But it came back to haunt him, because the college didn't understand the context of his page, they just assumed it was a reflection of the real him. Alan Kaprow "Happenings in the New York Scene" Alan Kaprow's work in the Happenings reflects a strong desire to break down the wall between the audience and the creator in art. However, Kaprow's methods are entirely different from others who reflect the desire to include the audience in action, such as Augosto Boal; Kaprow simply wants to enjoy the experience of his Happenings, whereas Boal wants to use the Theater of the Oppressed to affect social change. The Happenings raise an important question about the role of the artist as an editor and director of the process - is this restructuring of the experience really different, or is it just accepting a little amount of audience input for the artist's manipulation? Are the Happenings really interactive? Kaprow starts his essay by describing the feelings that Happenings bring out in people, using jarring language, making the experience seem bizarre and incomprehensible. He then begins to describe how Happenings came to exist, pointing out that those who create Happenings are a small group mostly consisting of painters, who merely want "no separation of audience and play" (NMR 85). They don't their artworks and installations to be presented, the artists want them to "happen." Kaprow also makes it clear that the focus of these artists isn't to make artworks that are adhere to typical 'good taste', but instead to create new and unknown experiences. As Kaprow states, "A Happening is generated in action" - what's important isn't necessarily what is made, but what happens, what experience occurs. This desire for creation is also reflected in the use of chance in Happenings, as the creators use chance to introduce spontaneity into their works as a way to reflect vivacity and unpredictability. Because of this precarious balancing of chance and planning, Kaprow explains that happenings cannot be reproduced. Kaprow feels that Happenings represent a great hope for art; he compares Happenings to abstract expressionism in its importance as he says "Happenings are not just another new style. Instead, like American art of the late 1940s, they are a moral act, a human stand of great urgency" (NMR p87). Kaprow feels that art is stultified, success makes artists capitulate to good taste; his response is the Happenings, which reject standard artistic notions of making money from your work, letting it become successful, etc. Kaprow tries to redefine the American artistic notion of success. Critical Art Ensemble (CAE) "Nomadic Power and Cultural Resistance" From introduction to the essay: "CAE demolished the idea that it is impossible for power to co-opt network and hypertext technologies" (NMR p.781) In this article, the Critical Art Ensemble articulates the point of view that entrenched powers have the ability to inhabit virtual space, which makes subverting those entrenched power relations even more difficult. Though the 'virtual nomad' was a hopeful concept for technoliberationists who believed that being removed from a physical base of operations would help to fight entrenched power relations, CAE posits the nomad as a model that entrenched power relations can occupy as well. CAE uses the metaphor of the Scythian power model, based on a nomadic tribe that attacked anyone it encountered - incredibly powerful because the tribe could never be found to be defeated, the Scythians could only be located by those they were attacking - they almost appeared out of nowhere and their power came from their enemies inability to locate and defeat them. CAE uses the Scythian model as to descibe contemporary entrenched institutions as "where speed/absence and intertia/presence collide in Hyperreality." CAE then goes on to question how the problem of entrenched power has been fought in the past and what means could be used to fight against the nomad as a model for capitalistic institutions. In particular, CAE questions subversion as an effective practice against institutional power relations on the grounds that subversion implies a fixed, static entity to oppose. CAE suggests that since nomadism gives institutional powers the ability to remain physically dislocated (intersecting between speed/absence and intertia/presence), a new act of opposition must be created. Though the article doesn't go very far in depth with this concept, CAE suggests the disturbance as an act of opposition - though what disturbance is remains unclear and ambiguous. David Garcia and Geert Lovink "The ABC of Tactical Media" and "The DEF of Tactical Media" Garcia and Lovink lay out their conceptions of tactical media as a loose group of artists and creators whose work contains common characteristics such as staging public interventions using 'sophisticated media techniques' to manipulate media images. As to why Lovink and Garcia focus on media images, they state "We continue to languish in a world in which many struggles appear to have left the street and the factory floor and migrated into an ideological space of representation, constructed by and through media." Rather than making large andproclamatory statements about what tactical media means, Garcia and Lovink instead choose to make short, fragmentary sentences and descriptors for new media. For the authors, tactical media is the use of cheap, manipulated media by fringe individuals to create situated and participatory art projects; oppositional, though sometimes stuck in that role; the work of some creators to recognize power reversals as central to their practice. Some examples of Tactical Media projects include: *Coco Fusco and Guillermo Gomez-Pena's project "Couple in the Cage" http://www.thing.net/~cocofusco/subpages/videos/subpages/couple/couple.html *The Yes Men (Andy Bichlbaum and Mike Bonanno are the public face) http://theyesmen.org/ *Krzysztof Wodiczko's "Homeless Vehicle Project" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Krzysztof_Wodiczko Augusto Boal "Theatre of the Oppressed" The introduction of the essay urges readers to consider how Boal's "interactive techniques emphasize embodiment." Considering the ambiguity in the boundary between the space of new media and our physical bodies, it is important to ask whether Boal's strategies for crossing the divide between the individual audience member and the actor can be applied to the digital age. Boal describes theatre in three stages, the first two stages are not included in the excerpt in book. 'First Degree: Simultaneous Dramaturgy ' "This is the first invitation made to the spectator to intervene without necessitating his physical presence on stage." In this example, Boal dictates that a group of actors perform a ten to twenty minute skits, either with a script or through improvisation. At the climax of the skit where conflict must be resolved, the actors stop the performance and ask the audience for resolutions. The actors then improvise all the solutions and the audience is allowed to comment and direct the actor's work. Richard Stallman "GNU Manifesto" "Software sellers want to divide the users and conquer them, making each user agree not to share with others. I refuse to break solidarity in this way" - Richard Stallman